Sunshine CleaningReview

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An uncluttered drama that benefits from some bright performances.

By Christopher Monfette

A note on the wall reads, "Tell Edna you love her." An overturned lamp rests beside a bloodstained mattress. A cramped apartment filled with a lifetime's worth of clutter, each holding some small degree of sentiment… proof that our lives aren't only some singular narrative, told or remembered, so much as they are a complex collection of details and miniscule moments. That we all, in the end, leave behind our own personal museums. The artifacts of we. The history of us.

Sunshine Cleaning seems to understand this fact, offering up a simple story of a family-owned crime-scene cleaning business made substantially better by a respect for the details. Certainly, the world is no stranger to movies about broken people made whole again by some exposure to death, coming to grips with those who've passed on and finding a renewed interest in their own damaged lives, as well. Which is all to say that Sunshine Cleaning isn't particularly new so much as it is an excellent telling of an old, familiar story.

Amy Adams and Emily Blunt play sisters. Adams is the older, more responsible of the pair – a single mother involved in a go-nowhere affair with a married police detective played by Steve Zahn – while Blunt is the unemployed, directionless half, more deeply scarred by the loss of their mother as children. When the two come into a sudden need of money, Zahn offers up a suggestion: crime scene cleaning. A few hundred bucks to clean some guy's brains off a wall; a sure-fire racket and a quick, easy solution. Meanwhile, Adam's son partners up with his constantly scheming grandfather – played here by the always irascible Alan Arkin – who's constantly trying to play some angle of his own. And what's nice about the film are the simple realizations it allows the audience to have, such as why the sisters, for nearly two-thirds of the film, seem, almost at random, intensely interested in movies with scenes that take place in diners. The pay-off to that is understated, yet incredibly powerful.

It's not so much the story as the relationships that make Sunshine Cleaning so effective. Blunt's vaguely romantic friendship with the daughter of a formerly deceased client; Adams' unexpected friendship with the one-armed owner of a cleaning supply store, portrayed by Clifton Collins, Jr. in a subtle, yet infinitely likeable turn. Adams and Blunt play off each other nicely, matching each other scene for scene and creating characters who feel uniquely genuine – not simply like carbon copies of the emoting women we find in weepier, more heavy-handed films. Everybody here is flawed, everybody here is broken, but never so much that you don't feel for their situation, and never so much that the film feels as if it's wallowing. The crime-scene moments are quiet, subdued beats – never glorified or stylized – almost like post-mortem character studies, introducing us to people who neither the audience nor the sisters will ever have the opportunity to meet.

The film only really falters in the third act when a number of the relationships set adrift in the middle aren't entirely resolved by the closing credits. Characters simply disappear, despite our desire to know what became of them and why. To its credit, the film does this in order to focus on creating a more impactful conclusion for the film's main characters, but it's often the more secondary folks we find ourselves considering. And while we might miss them in the end, our frustration is a testament to just how well the film ultimately draws all of its characters.

Overall, Sunshine Cleaning is straightforward, yet effective family drama. And while it might easily have chosen – given its premise – to navigate quirkier, more off-beat waters, it plays itself straight and offers a well-acted, well-written experience.